Abstract

Thomasius profoundly reformed German Universities, supplying them with a new system of learning and scholarship which determined academic studies until the foundation of the University of Berlin. Jurisprudence acquired the utmost importance for expounding man and his world, coordinating all the other sciences and binding them to an universally accepted methodology. But at the same time this domineering legal science was bound to history, to the study of the past. This led to a reaffirmation of the elder German theory of state, reducing the influence of western European concepts of natural law accordingly, thus constituting the characteristics of German enlightenment which already contained in a nutshell the essentials of German idealism